Billtrust vs. Expensify vs. Xero

Billtrust would work best for an organization that has grown beyond the capacity for a few people in A/R to manage customer invoices, or A/P to manage vendor invoices. If your business system can create the files needed for automation with Billtrust, or can create payables from properly formatted data from Billtrust, then it's worth looking into what Billtrust can do for you. They are especially skilled in helping to convert paper-only customers to e-mail or online invoicing with dedicated "campaign" managers and reporting on e-invoice adoption rates to help you meet your goals.

Incentivized

I think it's really good for small businesses. At least in the way we use it. It's very good for keeping an eye on employee spending in nearly real time. I'm not sure how it works for larger companies when there is a larger number of people to keep track of.

Incentivized

I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.

Incentivized

• The payment portal is of the highest security, giving our participating customers piece of mind.
• By offering electronic methods of billing statement, and other documents, electronically (email, ebill, ebank presentations) we are able to save on printing an postage costs.
• Always on the cusp of emerging technologies, and willing to share their experience, Billtrust offers webinars, Twitterviews, classes, and conferences to keep you in the know and ahead in your industry.
• Billtrust has a crack customer service team that always responds promptly, and with through follow up. Even better yet, when you respond to a survey on their customer service, they will donate to charity - that shows a willingness to hear what their customers have to say.
• If you ever think of an idea, Billtrust is accepting of considering its implementation and how it can be incorporated into their services and systems, making the growth of services organically functional.

Incentivized

• I am able to submit my mileage and the great feature to put the starting destination and end destination. It auto populates the mileage for you!
• The coniserge is helpful and reminds me when I did not do certain things like submit my report. That’s a nice feature!
• I am able to submit my expenses quickly and it scans the receipts or you can upload a picture of them very quickly.

Incentivized

• Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
• Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
• Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.

Incentivized

• UI - Billtrust could've had a better design and overall user interface. Everything worked, but at times it could be challenging to navigate to the feature you needed to use.
• Internal Dashboard - The internal dashboard was outdated and hard to navigate at times. The data produced by the dashboard was congested and didn't provide the most efficient view for gathering certain customer information.

Incentivized

• Cant choose for specific lines of non -reimbursable expenses to several credit cards. only one preconfigured.
• there are limited cards to choose for with Expensify Travel as a corporate cards.
• The policy rules are pretty basic. i would like to have more granular options

• Multiple addresses for singular contacts.
• Limit unit price decimals to 2 digits, currently shows 3 or more after the decimal on invoices.
• Discounted rates for multiple entities within the same group e.g. if you have a group of 3 or more companies looking to move to Xero, incentivize those clients with discounted monthly rates.
• Easier way to reconcile loan accounts across multiple entities.

We have a longstanding good record of invoice delivery and a high number of customers who are accustomed to the look and feel for logging to make payments

Incentivized

Our company will use Expensify for as long as it will fit our purposes. However, it is obvious that once the fast-growing company will reach a certain size, we will need to transition to a more complex system. For our current purposes however, Expensify is great and I would recommend it to everyone

Incentivized

In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.

Not too busy or elaborate, able to quickly log in & start using right away

Incentivized

So simple to set up and use. It was easy to roll out to all our staff! The demos, instructions, and FAQ's were well written and enabled us to train our staff quickly. We have frontline employees who have mastered the system in a day. The scalability is also perfect. We are able to start with just a few cards and grew that number as our organization needed without any problems.

Incentivized

As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.

We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.

On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.

Incentivized

After 15 years I have only had a handful of support cases each year. When I have created support cases for issues the response time is under 24 hours. And the initial response is typically enough for me to close the case. I do not remember a case that needed to be escalated. For cases I opened to request changes (subject line, logo, etc.) the case is typically resolved within 7 days, and always includes examples for me to verify before the change is put into production. There are not typically any issues with Billtrust itself - my support cases typically involve issues that we caused with bad data, or requests for information we do not have access to through any of the existing reports.

Incentivized

Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.

Incentivized

Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.

The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

Incentivized

All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.

I was not here for the implementation

Incentivized

The implementation process went rather smoothly, linking it to the bank and cards was handled easily. without too many unnecessary steps. Getting the accounts setup did take some time, but that would be true with any organization. All in all things went smoothly and I was very pleased with the setup and implementation process

If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.

Incentivized

For a less tech-educated workforce, Billtrust did the job and required minimal developer resources on our end. Also, while Billtrust lacked in several arenas relative to Stripe, it was good for us since we were not a subscription-based business. For the price, Billtrust was a good solution for our invoice-to-pay business.

Incentivized

Concur is the only formal software I've used, though I think this was only used in my PhD program (2010-2014), so in fairness, it's been a while. I remember Concur being just OK. It was certainly easier to use than the 'upload documents to email' process my former employer had instituted, but it was not Expensify-level smart and easy. At least back then, there was no simple drag-and-drop document parsing for example.

Incentivized

MYOB has always seemed well behind in the functionality. We recently discontinued our DEAR subscription due to astronomical increase in subscription fees. While Xero doesn't do as much in terms of inventory management we can manage without that function for the lower price.

Incentivized

I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing

Incentivized

• We are currently using it to reconcile two large vendor accounts.
• We have been making electronic payments through our p-card for the past several months - allowing us to earn rebates of 1.17 - 1.25% on the payments made.
• The downside is. The data isn't that clean, and we have spent hours and hours trying to get to the real number we owe to these vendors.

Incentivized

• Positives include - timely expense reports to reconcile our fiscal year financials
• Negatives include - the monthly service fee per employee (even if no expenses were generated that month) - it is not cost effective for ALL of our employees to utilize the application.

Incentivized

• Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
• Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
• In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.